Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Jack Carston and Me

A recent interview with a good friend, the
highly talented and incisive journalist Sara Bain, forced me to think about my
relationship with the main character in my contemporary crime novels, DCI Jack
Carston. I’ve known him for about 20 years now and I think he’s getting ready
to retire. He first came into my head in the early 90s and now, 5 books later,
the compromises he’s had to make are beginning to get to him.

He started because the UK publisher,
Piatkus, liked a stand alone thriller my agent had sent them but wanted a
police procedural instead, so I set about writing Material Evidence. The ending/solution was based on an actual case
I read about in a book on forensic medicine, but the interest came from Carston
and the team I found around him. I say ‘I found’ and that seems to be how it
was. They all emerged, with their tics, foibles, ways of speaking and
relationships ready formed.

Carston himself
is curious about things, a creative thinker; he’s interested in people but
routines bore and frustrate him. His opinion of some of his superiors is
relatively low but his wife, Kath, makes sure that his self-esteem doesn’t
get so high as to make him obnoxious. In fact, the love and humour in their
marriage is one of the strongest themes running through the books.

Why did he choose to
join the police? Well, he’s always wondering what makes people (including
himself) tick and likes solving puzzles. At first he joined because he was
idealistic and wanted to be on the side of the good guys – but the job has made
him more aware that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are relative terms, especially when it
comes to people’s motives for what they do. His high success rate derives from
the fact that he’s not only fascinated by people, he cares about them, too. He’s
not obviously ‘flawed’, has no particular rituals, doesn’t drive a flash car,
and his only addiction is his wife. He has a temper, is sometimes childish,
doesn’t tolerate fools, despises people who don’t respect the rights of others
and is driven mainly by compassion.

I’ve followed him
through five books so far and, without any conscious plan on my part, he’s
definitely evolved – and in a specific direction. The job has taken him more
deeply into the psyches of other people (and his own) and, if he had any moral
certainties to start with, he certainly doesn’t now. When I first wrote about
him, he solved the case by using the testimony of the various suspects to get
into the mind of the victim. The picture he saw there was pretty bleak. But the
way he did it – using the physical evidence, but building a picture of who the
dead woman was – told me I was dealing with someone who trusted his insights
into behaviours. In the next book, things were clearer because there was a
definite ‘baddie’. Even then, though, the murders and the motives were
surprising and not at all clear cut.

It was The Darkness that signalled the real
change. He found himself sympathising with someone who was living a normal life
helping others but who was also guilty of very serious crimes. It had quite an
impact on him and when, in book four, his investigations brought him in contact
with highly intelligent people in a university and hospital, the pettiness,
self-importance and corrupt nature of some of the people there put another dent
in his certainties.

And in the latest
book, Unsafe Acts, at the same time
as he’s trying to solve two murders and unravel a plot to sabotage an offshore
platform, a vindictive superior officer decides he’s had enough of Carston’s
unconventional approaches and he faces a charge of indiscipline. It makes him
wonder whether he should actually leave the force.

I’m not yet sure of the
answer to that, but I will be when I start book six, which might well be the
last in the series.

Thanks Beth. In fact, this week, at the request of a journalist friend, I did something different with him on my own blog. I let her interview him and was interested (and strangely surprised) at some of his responses. What weird people we are.